ST. GEORGE — The fluttering that flies out walking on the grass, the extra passenger on the hood of the car, those things flying around the streetlights at night.

People aren’t imagining things. The grasshoppers are back. 

While it’s not near the scale of the massive infestation seen in spring 2019 when the ground was seemingly covered in grasshoppers and other insects, residents have noticed a proliferation of the hoppers in recent weeks.

University of Oklahoma insect ecologist Elske Tielens, who authored the study that determined the cause of the 2019 grasshopper infestation that struck Southern Utah and, to a greater extent, the Las Vegas area, said the cause of the current invasion is exactly the same: It’s what comes after the storm when two metropolitan areas that act as light beacons in a mostly dark desert. 

“It has been a wet late summer,” Tielens told St. George News. “I do imagine the fact that we are seeing these high numbers of grasshoppers so late in the season might have something to do with the monsoons and high rainfall in the late summer this year. It’s just remained green,  vegetated later in the season.”

The last two months had a seemingly unending pattern of afternoon and early evening monsoon storms; 84% of the rain that has fallen on St. George this year came in the last two months of summer, according to National Weather Service numbers. 

Tielens’ study on the 2019 infestation determined it came after a high amount of precipitation in the winter that increased the growth of vegetation the grasshoppers feed on. As anyone with a porch light can attest to, insects are drawn to light at night. From space, the area between Southern California and Southern Nevada looks bathed in darkness except for the bright beacons of the Las Vegas area, Mesquite and St. George.

Like 2019, the movement of the grasshoppers is being seen on the weather radar that usually shows the buildup of storms. A video of the National Weather Service’s NEXRAD radar readings from Wednesday night shows not the buildup of a storm but a movement of the grasshoppers who Tielens say take flight shortly after sunset. 

The images look like an infection growing with Las Vegas as the center and enveloping all of Southern Nevada. Just to the northeast, a smaller blot looks like the satellite of an asteroid growing where St. George is marked on the map. 

Tielens said this year’s grasshopper radar is “much smaller” 

The grasshoppers themselves are harmless to humans, and insect experts say the best way to deal with them is to leave them alone and let them fly away. The most harm they may do to humanity is feeding on the crops. 

Scientists also say that grasshoppers thrive in warm sunny conditions, and the best stimulation of grasshopper population is a heavy rainfall during drought conditions. It’s not breaking news that these are exactly the conditions seen locally of late. 

That said, Tielens said she doesn’t expect this infestation will come close to rivaling 2019.

“For a large outbreak, you need the build-up of several generations of grasshoppers, which happens when there are wet conditions earlier in the year and consequently lots of vegetation for the grasshoppers to feed on,” Tilens said. “It’s been drier in the winter-spring this year than a couple years ago, and that as such the numbers of grasshoppers just haven’t built up this to cause the same size of outbreak.”

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